UK Getting LTE

Posted by
Sam Churchill
on
May 25th, 2011

British Telecom (BT) and Everything Everywhere (EE) have announced a joint LTE trial for later this year, involving up to 100 mobile and 100 fixed line customers in Cornwall, covering 25 square kilometres. The trial will begin in September and it will continue into early 2012, using two 10MHz channels in the 800MHz spectrum.

The 800MHz band consists of spectrum leftover from the switch to digital TV. It will be freed up completely at the end of this Summer. The 2.6GHz band is a huge 200 MHz swath that’s designated for “4G” services world-wide, for both WiMAX and LTE.

The middle section of the 2.6GHz band is generally set aside by governments for unpaired frequencies, commonly used for WiMAX or TD-LTE. The United States is one of the few countries that doesn’t have this spectrum up for auction. That’s because it was privately aggregated by Craig McCaw, Sprint-Nextel, WorldComm, and others, 7-8 years ago.